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Ruth King

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Israeli football teams ready to take on the world — part 2 :Steve Leibowitz

By on September 3rd, 2016

After arriving in Marco Polo Airport in Venice, Italy, Yonah Mishaan and I went to get our rented 9-seater Fiat van, which the coach calls our Mercava tank. We proceeded to drive to the host city of Lignano Sabbiadoro, located about an hour’s drive away. Thanks to the Israeli-invented Waze GPS, our journey was easy. Before arriving at our hotel, I spotted a soccer stadium and we soon realized that this was “Stadio G. Teghil” where our football games would be played in the coming days. Italian football officials were on the field, placing all the markings for the gridiron. We were greeted warmly by our Italian friends who we had gotten to know at previous football events organized by the International Federation of American football. They graciously showed us the Israeli team locker room that had already been inspected by our Israeli security personnel.

Upon reaching Hotel Falcon, Yonah and I met the Israeli cooks who arrived a day earlier to prepare kosher food for our team. Feeding 45 football players and 18 support staff is a daunting task, when all of the food is kosher. Only about a third of our team are observant, but our entire team, including non-Jewish players and coaches, will eat kosher in Italy. We have many observant players and the Israel American Football Federation is the only sports federation in the country that will not play on Shabbat, and observes Jewish dietary laws.

In the evening, Yonah and I visited the beautiful coastal town of Lignano Sabbiadoro, which is not usually on the tourist agenda of most Israeli visitors.

Thursday morning, we headed to meet the rest of the team, back at the Venice airport, where a bus was waiting to bring the full contingent to the hotel. Loading up the players, each carrying their football gear, reminded me of mobilizing a reserve IDF platoon. Each player carried a duffle bag, with his helmet, shoulder pads, cleats and uniform. They looked grim and determined for the battle ahead.

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CAROLINE GLICK ON OBAMA AND IRAN DEAL

By on September 3rd, 2016

On August 4, during the course of a press conference, Obama gave his interim assessment of his nuclear agreement with Iran. “It worked,” he insisted.The time for complaining about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has passed. The time has come to overcome the damage enormous damage his signature foreign policy accomplishment has caused.

To understand why this is the case, it is important to understand the breadth and depth of Obama’s failure.

A year after the deal was signed, Obama argued, events have proven that he was right and the deal’s critics were wrong.

“You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get $150 billion to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass,” he proclaimed.

Obama then snidely swiped at the deal’s opponents saying that it would be “impressive” if the people who criticized the deal would own up to their mistakes and admit that it worked.

As it works out, everything that Obama said about the deal with Iran during his press conference was a lie.

Some of his lies became apparent within hours.

For instance, Obama falsely claimed that Israel now “acknowledges this has been a game changer and Iran has abided by the deal and they no longer have the sort of short-term breakout capacity that would allow them to develop nuclear weapons.”

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Hillary’s World

By on September 3rd, 2016

“The United States is an exceptional nation,” she said. “I believe we are still Lincoln’s last, best hope of Earth . . . And part of what makes America an exceptional nation, is that we are also an indispensable nation. In fact, we are the indispensable nation. People all over the world look to us and follow our lead.” She asserted that “we recognize America’s unique and unparalleled ability to be a force for peace and progress, a champion for freedom and opportunity” and that “our power comes with a responsibility to lead, humbly, thoughtfully, and with a fierce commitment to our values”:

Because, when America fails to lead, we leave a vacuum that either causes chaos or other countries or networks rush in to fill the void. So no matter how hard it gets, no matter how great the challenge, America must lead . . . [O]ur network of allies is part of what makes us exceptional. No other country in the world has alliances like ours. Russia and China have nothing close . . . At our best the United States is the global force for freedom, justice and human dignity.

Hillary Clinton’s global vision reflects the fundamentally flawed post-Cold War consensus, to which both ends of the Beltway Duopoly—neoconservatives and neoliberals—subscribe with equal zeal. Its key tenet is that our unchallengeable military might is essential to the maintenance of a global order in which the U.S. Government treats each and every spot on the globe as an area of vital American interest, fiercely resists any change of regional power balances, and actively promotes regime changes. The resulting military interventions in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (and, if Hillary wins, there will be one in Syria) have been validated by the rhetoric of . . . well, she reminded us: “peace and progress,” “freedom and opportunity,” “justice and human dignity,” and by the invocation of American exceptionalism and indispensability (M. Albright). In world affairs America is supposedly motivated by “a fierce commitment to our values,” rather than mere interests.

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ANTI-SEMITISM AT SWARTHMORE COLLEGE

By on September 3rd, 2016

A Response to Yesterday’s Anti-Semitic Hate CrimeBy William Meyer – From the Swarthmore College Newspaper

By now you’ve probably already heard that on Tuesday night students discovered swastikas graffitied in McCabe. I’m not sure what’s worse: the fact that this incident happened or the fact that I wasn’t all that surprised.

You’d think that I’d be shocked to learn that the symbol of the regime that brutally murdered dozens of my own family members, including my great-grandfather and his brothers, was drawn in my campus library. Instead, I find myself feeling depressingly unfazed, almost numb.

Maybe seeing Nazi imagery across Europe when I was there last January desensitized me. Maybe reading about anti-Semitic incidents at colleges across the country has prepared me. Maybe constantly seeing images of anti-Semitic graffiti in the news shared by frightened Jews, like the image accompanying this article, has numbed me to the horror of what such graffiti represents.

Drawing swastikas, the symbol of Nazi Germany, has long been a method of intimidating and spreading terror amongst those groups targeted by the Nazis, particularly Jews. Yet, the growing global and national tide of anti-Semitism made this all too predictable.

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Despoiling the Environment to Save the Climate Bill McKibben’s plan would mean bird carnage and whole regions paved with wind turbines. By Robert Bryce

By on September 2nd, 2016

Bill McKibben loves the climate. Unfortunately, he hates the environment.

For proof of that, consider McKibben’s recent cover story in The New Republic, where he asserts that the U.S. must mobilize to fight climate change with the same fervor the Allies used to defeat Hitler during World War II. After citing a few examples of recent weather events, which, in his view, prove that global warming is happening now, McKibben writes, “If Nazis were the ones threatening destruction on such a global scale today, America and its allies would already be mobilizing for a full-scale war.”

While Nazi analogies can be fun, the climate cure that McKibben, the founder of 350.org, and his friends are pushing would result in the despoliation of vast swaths of the American landscape. Indeed, it would require that an area the size of Texas and Louisiana combined be covered with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines.

The strategist behind McKibben’s climate crusade is Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who has published papers arguing that the U.S. doesn’t need oil, coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy. According to Jacobson, the U.S. can rely solely on energy derived from wind, water, and the sun.

Jacobson has an entire claque of admirers. During his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders, (I., Vt.) adopted Jacobson’s all-renewable scheme whole cloth and made it his energy plan. That move immediately won praise from the leaders of both the Sierra Club and Greenpeace USA. In addition, the recent Democratic-party platform claims that the U.S. should be running entirely on “clean” energy by 2050. Jacobson’s all-renewable dystopia is also being promoted by actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as well as by anti-fracking activist Josh Fox. In addition, Jacobson has formed a group call the Solutions Project, which is avidly promoting his 100 percent–renewables plan.

In his essay, McKibben adheres to the liberal-left orthodoxy by completely ignoring nuclear energy’s pivotal role in cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Instead, he praises Jacobson’s work, claiming that it “demonstrates conclusively” that the U.S. could be running solely on renewables by 2050. Achieving that, says McKibben, would need about 6,448 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity.

As usual, the devil is in the details. Jacobson’s 50-state scenario, which is available on a Stanford University website, needs about 2,500 gigawatts of wind-energy capacity and another 3,200 gigawatts or so of solar capacity. Those are staggering quantities, particularly when you consider that current U.S. generation capacity — from nuclear to geothermal — totals about 1,000 gigawatts.

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Trump immigration speech: A president was born on Wednesday: Wayne Allyn Root

By on September 2nd, 2016

Trump immigration speech: A president was born on Wednesday

America, we were introduced to our next president on Wednesday night. He’s not a politician. He is one of a kind. He is an American. Welcome President Donald J. Trump.

I’m a cynical Jewish Ivy Leaguer from New York. Nothing gets me too excited. I don’t believe politicians. Nor do I believe in politicians. I don’t fall for theatrical political productions. I don’t believe rhetoric or propaganda. And I’ve never teared up over a political speech in my life.

Until now. . .

Wednesday night I found myself fist-pumping. I found myself chanting along with the crowd “USA, USA, USA.” And as the procession of mothers and fathers came up to the podium to state the name of their child — who was murdered by illegal immigrants — and then say “I’m voting for Trump” or “Trump is our last chance to save America” I found myself tearing up. And the amazing thing is… I couldn’t stop. The tears rolled down my face.

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A Tough but Sensible Immigration Policy By The Editors

By on September 2nd, 2016

After two weeks spent waffling on immigration, and making noises on the subject largely indistinguishable from those of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Donald Trump has settled on a hawkish position — and a practical one. Trump’s crowd-pleasing antics aside, in his immigration speech in Phoenix, Ariz., on Wednesday he laid out a sensible, realistic path forward on genuine immigration reform.

Trump’s plan, even in its most primitive iterations, always has been based on the entirely commonsensical principle that America’s immigration policy should serve American interests. Taking this as a starting point, Trump laid out a ten-point policy that emphasizes securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, prioritizing the removal of criminal aliens, and creating the legal and economic disincentives necessary to reduce illegal immigration in the long term.

These are the right priorities. On border security, Trump renewed his commitment to a “physical” wall on the southern border (as well as, alas, his absurd promise that Mexico would pay for it), pledged to swell the ranks of the understaffed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies, and vowed to deploy technology, such as below-ground sensors, to aid them. He also promised an end to the catch-and-release policies that have defined the Obama-era commitment (or lack thereof) to border security and to defund sanctuary cities (an initiative that would, of course, have to come out of Congress). And as Trump noted, about half of America’s illegal-immigrant population overstayed legally gotten visas, meaning that a comprehensive visa-overstay tracking system of the sort he is proposing is also crucial part of any real enforcement agenda.

Trump would add to this an expanded use of E-Verify, which would help prevent employers from exploiting illegal labor and so make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to find work. “Turning off the jobs and benefits magnet,” to use Trump’s words, would make the prospect of entering and residing in the country less enticing for foreigners. If immigration trends at the height of the Great Recession are any indication, a sizable number of illegal immigrants are likely to return home when jobs are not readily available.

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Serving Muslim Interests With American Foreign Policy The lethal consequences of the Clintons’ foreign policy leadership. Joseph Klein

By on September 2nd, 2016

A Hillary Clinton presidency would likely continue along the pro-Islamist foreign policy arc that both her husband’s administration and the Obama administration have developed.

President Bill Clinton committed U.S. military resources to help Muslims during the so-called “humanitarian” intervention in Bosnia. However, he chose to turn a blind eye to the genocide that swamped Rwanda during his administration. As G. Murphy Donovan wrote in his American Thinker article “How the Clintons Gave American Foreign Policy its Muslim Tilt,” “Muslim lives matter, Black Africans, not so much.” Noting that “it was Muslim unrest that precipitated Serb pushback, civil war, and the eventual collapse of Yugoslavia,” Donovan added, “Bosnians are, for the most part, Muslims with a bloody fascist pedigree.” Nevertheless, with no strategic U.S. national interest at stake, Bill Clinton tilted American foreign policy in favor of the Muslim side in the Bosnia conflict. We are now reaping the lethal consequences of that tilt. Donovan points out in his article that, on a per capita basis, Bosnia Herzegovina is the leading source of ISIS volunteers in all of Europe.

President Obama, along with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, took the side of Islamist “rebels” against the secular authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Libya and Syria that had managed to keep the lid on jihadist terrorism for many years. These Islamists included members of al Qaeda as well as the Muslim Brotherhood.

In Libya, Hillary Clinton was the leading voice pressing for military intervention against Col. Muammar el- Qaddafi’s regime. She did so, even though, according to sources cited in a State Department memo passed on to Hillary by her deputy at the time, Jake Sullivan, in an e-mail dated April 1, 2011, “we just don’t know enough about the make-up or leadership of the rebel forces.” In fact, as subsequently reported by the New York Times, the only organized opposition to the Qaddafi regime that had developed underground during Qaddafi’s rule were the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a terrorist group, and the Muslim Brotherhood. The author of the State Department memo had acknowledged the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s terrorist past but said they “express a newfound keenness for peaceful politics.” Was Hillary Clinton relying on such assurances of a reformed “peaceful” Islamic group fighting against Qaddafi, even though it had been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 2004 and one of its leaders, Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, praised al Qaeda members as “good Muslims” in a March 2011 interview? If so, that is just another indication of her bad judgment.

As for Egypt, Hillary was informed by her outside adviser and confidante Sid Blumenthal, in an e-mail dated December 16, 2011, that the Muslim Brotherhood’s intention was to create an Islamic state. Moreover, the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and other radical groups was “complicated,” Blumenthal quoted a source “with access to the highest levels of the MB” as saying. Blumenthal also reported, based on a confidential source, that Mohamed Morsi, who was then leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, believed that “it will be difficult for this new, Islamic government to control the rise of al Qa’ida and other radical/terrorist groups.”

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Iran Ramps up Tensions in the Arabian Gulf While Obama continues to appease. September 2, 2016 Ari Lieberman

By on September 2nd, 2016

On Monday, the Iranian propaganda outlet, Tasnim, reported that Iranian anti-aircraft crews succeeded in detecting and warding off a U.S. spy drone that strayed into Iranian airspace from neighboring Afghanistan. If true, it would mark yet another US-Iranian clash in the region. Though the instant confrontation was relatively minor and did not result in injury or damage, it is demonstrative of the more aggressive and assertive tone the Iranian military is taking with respect to its dealings with the United States and the region since the signing of Obama’s much touted Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the plan that provides the Islamic Republic with a legal pathway toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

According to a U.S. defense official, U.S. and Iranian naval vessels interacted on at least 300 occasions in 2015 and on more than 250 occasions this year alone. Many of those encounters were relatively benign but some were the result of egregious Iranian provocations.

In December of 2015, Iranian navy boats fired rockets within 1,500 feet of aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman. On January 12, 2016, an Iranian drone flew uncomfortably close to the Harry S. Truman. A U.S. Navy spokesman called the flyover “abnormal and unprofessional.” The Navy could have easily downed the drone but inexplicably chose not to. Such an action would have sent the Iranians the proper message without causing loss of life but the drone was nevertheless allowed to conduct its surveillance unmolested.

The very day that the drone was shadowing U.S. naval forces, the Iranians seized 10 American navy personnel and two Riverine Command Boats near Farsi Island in the Arabian Gulf. The RCB is heavily armed and armored but despite overwhelming firepower, the RCB crews humiliatingly surrendered to the Iranians without firing a shot. The crew and its commander displayed an abject lack of fighting spirit. A Pentagon investigation revealed that there were morale and training problems as well as a number of human errors that led to the shameful fiasco. Several officers were reprimanded and relieved of command as a result.

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Thornton: We Citizens Have to Guard the Media ‘Guardians’ Mainstream media journalists rationalize their war on Trump. Bruce Thornton

By on September 2nd, 2016

The mainstream media’s lopsided coverage of the presidential campaign has gotten so blatantly anti-Trump and pro-Hillary that even some progressives are starting to notice. The New York Times’ media reporter Jim Rutenberg last month had a front-page column slyly justifying the bias by a clever use of rhetorical questions: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”

Rutenberg’s dubious implication is that Trump is so outrageously unprecedented and dangerous a candidate in American history that he can’t be covered objectively. “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional.” But Rutenberg says he rues this development, for it compromises “that idealistic form of journalism with a capital ‘J’ we’ve been trained to always strive for.”

Say what? Was it an “idealistic form of journalism” when the media carried on its “slobbering love affair,” as Bernie Goldberg put it, with Barack Obama in 2008? Where were the intrepid “guardians” of the public weal when the media ignored the gaps in Obama’s history, his fabrications in his memoirs, and his associations with the racist pastor Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayres? Or when Journolist, an online discussion group of journalists and activists, colluded to downplay these unpleasant facts and coordinate negative coverage of the Republicans?

Or how about CNN Political Correspondent Candy Crowley in the 2012 presidential debate, violating every canon of professional objectivity when she intruded herself into the debate in Obama’s favor by backing up his false claim that he had called the Benghazi attacks an act of terror? And don’t forget Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, who recently wrote in Time magazine, “Like it or not, this election is a plebiscite on the most divisive, polarizing and disrupting figure in American politics in decades. And neutrality is not an option.” Or CNN calling “false,” without any evidence, AP’s story that more than half of Hillary’s non-governmental meetings while Secretary of State were with donors to her foundation. Are these examples of “idealistic” journalism?

Despite all this contrary evidence, Rutenberg recycles one of the progressive media’s most cherished self-justifying myths, that there really is an “objective” journalism they supposedly practice. Such a notion has seldom existed in American history, and has especially been scarce since the 1960s, when activist journalism came out of the closet with its ideological coverage of Vietnam and then Watergate, all perfumed with the spurious claim to journalistic integrity and public service.

The truth is, journalism has been a form of political activism long before Jim Rutenberg noticed. Orville Schell, dean of the prestigious UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1996-2006, was not shy about embracing this role for journalism: “In a democracy,” Schell wrote over a decade ago, “indeed in any intelligent society, the media and politicians have to lead. The media should be introducing us to new things, interesting things, things we don’t already know about; helping us change our minds or make up our minds, not just pandering to lowest-denominator wisdom.”

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